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Tuesday, May 28, 2013

The Trouble With the Enlightenment

All of our civilization is a
child of the enlightenment. What is not
properly understood is that it was actually a moment in which critical mass was
achieved in terms of the intellectual endeavor and that critical mass was
facilitated by the steady rise of the printing press and far more critically
the rise of a general education which naturally liberated the gifted few.

It did not matter that a million
children learned just enough to read the bible, it was way more important that
the one in a thousand was identified and brought forward. General education was a sieve to sort out the
future and once put in place it never slowed even.

This is a good read, although
take your time at it and remember that it is still not over.

Like all good liberal intellectuals of the last century, Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog spent a great deal of time agonising over the legacy of the Enlightenment. Cuckolded and divorced, Herzog seeks to make sense of himself, his country, and his century by writing unsent letters to philosophers and politicians, alive and dead. He laments the “liberal-bourgeois illusion of perfection, the poison of hope,” and demands that President Eisenhower “make it all clear to me in a few words.” Instead, he learns the brutal truth from his friend Sandor Himmelstein. “Somewhere in every intellectual is a dumb prick,” Sandor tells Herzog. “You guys can’t answer your own questions… What good are these effing eggheads! It takes an ignorant bastard like me to fight liberal causes.”

In the last decade or so, defenders of the Enlightenment have shunned
Herzog’s anxieties about liberal modernity in favour of Sandor’s belligerence.
In the wake of 9/11 and the perceived threats of Islamic fundamentalism, a
brotherhood of articulate, no-bullshit philosophes, led by Christopher
Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, dragged debates about the Enlightenment’s legacy
out of the academy and into the public sphere. They traced all that was
worth defending in the modern western world to the 18th century, when
rationality, science, secularism and democracy took hold of the European mind.

Though they possessed an impressive capacity for tub-thumping alarmism, these modern freethinkers were by no means the first to mobilise the Enlightenment for their cause. The 18th-century philosophes such as Voltaire, Diderot and d’Alembert effectively volunteered their services to the debates of subsequent generations by presenting themselves as the vanguard of modernity. In 1784, Immanuel Kant famously described the Enlightenment as “humanity’s escape from self-imposed tutelage”; it was an intellectual revolution which allowed the human mind to fulfil its natural desire to think for itself, and from which social and political freedom would follow. In short, the Enlightenment presented itself as the dawn of modern self-consciousness, and as the beginning of reason’s slow but inexorable triumph over myth and obscurantism.

Of course, the philosophes’ self-fashioning as liberators of
mankind invited detractors. Just over 20 years after Kant’s triumphalist
declaration, Hegel would blame the Enlightenment for the guillotine and the bloody
excesses of the French Revolution, thus laying the groundwork for the criticism
that the Enlightenment had sacrificed love, spirituality and tradition at the
altar of reason and absolute freedom. Kant and Hegel effectively dug the
trenches for the 20th-century philosophical battle over the Enlightenment. From
Germany on the eve of the
Nazi seizure of power, Ernst Cassirer launched a pre-emptive defence of Weimar liberalism by reviving Kant’s philosophy of reason. In Californian exile in 1944, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno retaliated against Cassirer’s naivety: the Enlightenment, they said, had found expression not in the dying embers of the Weimar regime but in the murderous furnaces of Nazi Germany, and in the technocratic totalitarianism that was then tearing Europe apart. (The view that the Enlightenment led to Hitler is today popular with the religious right. “You know the Age of Enlightenment and Reason gave way to moral relativism,” said Penny Nance, the CEO of Concerned Women for America, on Fox News earlier this
week. “And moral relativism is what led us all the way down the dark path to
the Holocaust.”)

Horkheimer and Adorno’s nuclear Hegelianism, translated into English in
1972, energised the postmodern critique of liberal universalism. Continental
philosophers such as Derrida and Foucault attempted to reveal the absolutist
and imperialist nature of the principles of justice and truth, while in the
English-speaking world John Gray and Alasdair Macintyre blamed the
Enlightenment for the misguided utopian political projects of the 20th century
and for the atomised and materialist world of the capitalist west. Predictably,
the loyal children of the Enlightenment fought back. Where Kwame Anthony Appiah
described himself as a “neo-Enlightenment thinker,” others, such as Francis
Wheen, opted for stronger language to combat “mumbo-jumbo” irrationalism,
perhaps inspired by Ernest Gellner’s self-identification in his 1992
book Postmodernism, Reason and Religion as an “Enlightenment Rationalist
Fundamentalist.”

The strident rationalism of Hitchens, Wheen et al is, in this
way, simply the vulgarisation of a long intellectual tradition, whereby
thinkers view the Enlightenment in terms of whatever happens to be “modernity”
at a given time, whether it is the atheist and communist modernity of the early
20th century or the secular, democratic modernity of today. As the
Stanford historian Dan Edelstein recently pointed out, “accounts of the
Enlightenment accordingly become something else entirely: thinly veiled
ideological manifestos or pale reflections of current trends.”

Which makes it all the more strange that none of the major voices in
this recent debate about the legacy of the Enlightenment belongs to a
historian. It’s not as if the archives have been absent of historians
investigating the intellectual world of 18th-century Europe.
Since at least Peter Gay’s monumental The Enlightenment (1966),
scholars have been attempting to reconstruct what
the philosophes thought about their own politics and societies.
What’s more, they have told us who read the philosophes’ work and
what they made of it. They have told us that the Enlightenment was not only
based in Paris and Scotland but in Italy, Poland and the
European periphery. They have debated the reformist and revolutionary influence
of the Enlightenment, and argued whether we can even speak of a single
Enlightenment, given its various local manifestations. Our knowledge of the
political, intellectual and cultural world in which the 18th-century revolution
of the mind took place is vastly deeper and more textured than it was 50 years
ago.

And yet this vast industry of research has scarcely registered in the trench warfare over the Enlightenment’s intellectual legacy. For whatever reason, the nuancing, problematising conclusions of historians have failed to break the centuries-old Kantian-Hegelian lines across which philosophers, theorists and journalists trade ideological artillery. Historians are certainly not oblivious to the contemporary relevance of the Enlightenment, and the achievements of scholars over the past half-century, such as Robert Darnton, Daniel Roche and Franco Venturi, have been extraordinary, necessary, and celebrated in the world of academia; but their assertions have largely failed to resonate above the clamorous tussle over modernity.

Perhaps frustrated by the impotence of historians in fighting for
liberal causes, in 2001 Jonathan Israel released his inner Sandor Himmelstein
and published the first (800-page) instalment of a three-part history of the
philosophy of the Enlightenment. Here was a historian with impressive
credentials in the study of Spanish imperialism, the origins of capitalism and
the emergence of secularism in the 17th-century DutchRepublic—ideally
qualified, it seemed, to tie in the contingent origins of the Enlightenment
with its complex philosophical and political legacies.

No such luck. Despite the erudition of Israel’s monumental trilogy, he has
rightly been criticised for an out-of-control obsession with Spinoza and for
his apparent belief that what seem, to modern eyes, like the strongest
philosophical arguments of the age (for liberty, democracy, tolerance) were
also the most important historically. Many critics took Israel to be
projecting a particularly benevolent view of western secular democracy into the
distant and fundamentally different past. Once again, the 18th century had been
swallowed whole by modernity, its supposed creation.

What is a historian of ideas to do? A pessimist would say she is faced
with two options. She could continue to research the Enlightenment on its own
terms, and wait for those who fight over its legacy—who are somehow confident
in their definitions of what “it” was—to take notice. Or, as Israel has
done, she could pick a side, and mobilise an immense archive for the cause of
liberal modernity or for the cause of its enemies. In other words, she could
join Moses Herzog, with his letters that never get read and his questions that
never get answered, or she could join Sandor Himmelstein and the loud, ignorant
bastards. Is there any other way?

***

Hope of redemption comes with the news that Anthony Pagden has written
a book called The Enlightenment, And Why It Still Matters (OxfordUniversity Press, £20). Pagden, now at UCLA, has had a globetrotting career of which most academics can only dream. Educated in Chile,
London and Oxford,
he has held a host of positions in the history, politics and philosophy
departments at many of England,
Europe and America’s most elite academic institutions. He has written learned studies of western-European imperialisms, migrations and ideologies. His last book was a survey of 2500 years of global conflict between “east” and “west.” He is, without question, a man of the world, and perfectly qualified to give us a global perspective on why the Enlightenment, in all its historical particularity, “still matters.”

Pagden’s story begins with the world that the Enlightenment saw itself as replacing. The great thinkers of the 17th century—Newton, Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke—destroyed the scholasticism of the universities, which held that the human mind is hardwired with innate, God-given ideas, and replaced it with an account of human nature that relied instead on empirical experience and self-interest. The 18th century therefore inherited a worldview with rational man, not God, at its centre. But with Christianity no longer pulling the intellectual strings, what was to stop humanity from lapsing into self-centredness, cruelty and conflict?

The Enlightenment’s great achievement, Pagden argues, was to repair the bonds of mankind. Its distinctive feature was not that it held history, nature, theology and political authority to the scrutiny of reason, as most of its critics and many of its champions claim, but instead that it recognised our common humanity—our ability to place ourselves in another’s situation and, ultimately, to sympathise with them. Adam Smith and David Hume taught us that man is neither a creation of God nor a selfish pursuer of his own interests; at the most fundamental level, man is the friend of man. This, Pagden argues, was the origin of cosmopolitanism: the central Enlightenment belief in a common humanity and an awareness of belonging to some world larger than your own community.

For Pagden, the significance of this turn in human thought cannot be exaggerated. Cosmopolitanism “was, and remains, possibly the only way to persuade human beings to live together in harmony with one another, or, to put it differently, to stop killing each other.” It is inextricably tied to the Enlightenment’s “universalising vision of the human world” that ultimately led to a conception of civilisation in which questions of justice can be applied and upheld at a global level. Pagden admonishes critics of the Enlightenment project such as Gray and Macintyre for reducing it to a movement based on autonomous reason and objective science. Instead, the Enlightenment was about sympathy, the invention of civilisation, and the pursuit of a cosmopolitan world order.

While he is clearly in the Kantian camp in arguing for why the Enlightenment still matters, Pagden wants to make it clear that all participants in the debate have been fighting over the wrong issues. And these issues still matter because the cosmopolitan project is still incomplete. In shifting the focus of the Enlightenment away from science and reason in favour of sympathy and civilisation, Pagden may well have dodged the odd postmodern bullet. But what if his version of the Enlightenment is in fact even more questionable than the traditional “Age of Reason” Enlightenment with which the Hegelians, the postmodernists and the communitarians had such fun?

One major problem is that Pagden’s cosmopolitanism rests on outright
hostility to any religion. He believes that as long as any “ethics of belief”
still exists, the Enlightenment project will remain incomplete. For the most
part, his presentist defence of secular cosmopolitanism is restrained to coy,
rhetorical asides about suicide bombers, Pope Benedict XVI and “uneducated
believers.” Yet it manifests itself fully in the book’s conclusion: a bizarre
counter-history of a Europe in which the Enlightenment never happened—a Europe
that had “dropped behind,” before being conquered by its “centuries-old
antagonist to the east, the Ottoman Empire.”
It is a Europe in which nobody can think for
himself, choosing instead to listen to the Prophet and his laws. Europe has
become a civilisation which fails to progress, which is no kind of civilisation
at all.

This is a peculiar attempt to prove that the Enlightenment is all that
stands between the west and Islamist despotism. But it is the natural
culmination of a narrative that presents the Enlightenment project as the
discovery of some timeless truth that had previously been obscured by religion.
This raises a further objection to Pagden’s cosmopolitanism: it unquestioningly
endorses the Enlightenment belief that “civilisation” is the inevitable destiny
of all human beings and all human societies. The philosophes worked
this out in Europe in the 18th century, thinks
Pagden, and we in the west are still waiting for the rest of the world to catch
up.

But a cosmopolitanism that rests upon ideals that were developed
centuries ago in a few corners of Europe is
just about the most restrictive, parochial cosmopolitanism imaginable. In its
advocacy of a global “civilising process” it is archly imperial, recalling the
condescending liberal aspirations that Thomas Macaulay and John Stuart Mill
once held for the British Empire’s Indian
subjects. And in its comprehensive rejection of religion as having any role to
play in human understanding and organisation, it is a hopeless model for modern
global governance. No society has ever existed without being accompanied by
some form of religion or spirituality; this holds true today, even in the
“disenchanted” west. If the dawning of a new cosmopolitan era is waiting on the
disappearance of religion from human affairs, it will be waiting a long time.

This point about global governance is key, as Pagden is a keen supporter of supranational institutions such as the UN, tracing their origins back to Kant’s essay Toward a Perpetual Peace (1795). Kant was never quite clear on what this institution would be—a “league of peoples,” “an international state,” a “universal nation of states”—but Pagden emphasises that Kant could imagine a peaceful, global federation of political representatives. The global institutions that we have now, he argues, should be seen as a laudable attempt to make Kant’s imagined federation a reality.

Pagden’s faith in these institutions might strike some as quixotic, as
the European Union struggles to find an effective democratic solution to its
financial troubles, as UN sanctions struggle to deter bellicose nuclear powers,
and as the US continues to see itself as exempt from the International Criminal
Court. As Mark Mazower’s recent book persuasively argued, one of the principal
lessons of the 20th century is that the claims of cosmopolitan ideals and
institutions to trump the sanctity of borders “may turn out to produce more
wars, more massacres and more instability.” And even if some form of
cosmopolitanism or global legalism is needed to solve the problems of the
21st century, why should the answers lie exclusively with the cosmopolitanism
of 18thcentury Europe? Arguing from the
authority of the philosophes is unlikely to convince those
non-European cultures which have their own heritage of cosmopolitan thought,
nor those where the legacy of European imperialism is still a political factor.

Voltaire implored his contemporaries to eschew their deference to the past; perhaps it is time historians and theorists of the Enlightenment do the same. Pagden thinks the cosmopolitan Enlightenment that he has identified is so important that he has unquestioningly adopted its secular worldview, which sees global history marching in one direction, towards a future that was imagined in Europe over 200 years ago. In making his Enlightenment about sympathetic cosmopolitanism, he believes he has successfully broken free from the interminable debate about the legacy of the Age of Reason, in which the charges laid against the philosophesinclude technocratic scientism and the atomisation of society. But one doesn’t have to be a postmodernist, nor a postcolonial activist, to take exception to Pagden’s European triumphalism.

***

But all is not lost. Pagden makes no secret of writing his history of the Enlightenment with current debates in mind. Such presentism can skew our view of the past, and make us read into it the stories we want to tell ourselves. But it can also encourage us to discover aspects of the past that have previously been overlooked. And if Pagden’s account of enlightened cosmopolitanism is a surprisingly conventional narrative prompted by current controversies of “globalisation,” then there are promising signs that more original attempts will follow.

David Armitage, the Harvard historian, has recently argued that a renaissance in the history of international thought is underway. Intellectual historians are studying the movement, connections and interactions of ideas, how they travel and how they are communicated. Historians of the Enlightenment, for example, have begun to pay attention to Adam Smith’s claim that the two most important events in the history of mankind were the discovery of America and that of the passage to the East Indies around the Cape of Good Hope. Thephilosophes lived in a world connected across oceans by networks of navigation, commerce and correspondence, providing a contingent basis for their universal conceptions of cosmopolitanism and cultural progress. Humanity was drawn closer together in the 18th century not only in the minds of a few great thinkers but in a fundamentally material way as well.

While globalisation has encouraged historians to explore the spatial scope of Enlightenment ideas, another 21st century concern of planetary significance—the threat of climate change and global warming—has sent scholars in another fruitful direction. As the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has noted, the Enlightenment coincided with the period in which human beings switched from wood and other renewable fuels to the large-scale use of fossil fuels; the origins of ideological and material modernity, in other words, coincided with humankind becoming capable of causing lasting change to the planet. As Chakrabarty puts it, “the mansion of modern freedom stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use.” The not entirely unrealistic possibility that mankind might not in the future exist on this planet, that there might be a world without us, therefore calls into question the notions of freedom and of civilisation progressing endlessly into the future which began in the 18th century, along with mankind’s first significant intervention into its planetary environment.

These are grand historical projects, reflecting the scale of the contemporary concerns out of which they have emerged. It is unclear how the Enlightenment will look against the backdrop of primitive globalisation, or the planet’s transition to the anthropocene, but chances are that perspectives of such magnitude might shake the convictions of Kantians and Hegelians alike. These approaches will not be able to provide us with an Enlightenment that “still matters” in the sense that it has all of the answers to our political and philosophical anxieties. But unlike in Herzog, a question that goes unanswered is not always the sign of a nervous breakdown or of ideological impotence. A healthy society needs intellectuals to ask uncomfortable questions. After all, one of the many reasons the Enlightenment still matters is that it taught us to question how we got here, and what that might mean for where we’re going. And with questions like that, who can hope for easy answers?

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About Me

18 years old, having cleaned out my HS library, I concluded the only ambition worth having was becoming a great genius. An inner voice cheered. Yet it is my path I have shared much to the Human Gesalt. Mar 2017 - 4.56 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO described as the SPACE TIME PENDULUM. Sep 2010 -My essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS has been published in Physics Essays(AIP) June 2010 quarterly. 40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in Relativity. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled Paradigms Shift. I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data, record impressions, interpretations and to introduce new insights to readers.